Garden Report June 2017

Let’s talk tomatoes!!!! We built these two trellises out of electrical conduit and “trellises netting”… 6 feet tall, 12 feet wide, with a horizontal support tying into the wall of the house. As expected, this location seems to be great for the tomatoes, full sun all morning and then eventually some shade in the late afternoon.

We just harvested a few wittle tomatoes off of one of the stupices, they’re 52 days to harvest so that’s about on schedule. But we’ve got tons of big fruits starting to red on the early girls (no surprise) and the san marzanos (whaaaa that should be for another 2 weeks at least. Weird.) Here you can see, from front to back, a San Marzano, a cherry, and an early girl. Oh, and some sad looking basil:

Both of the cherry tomato plants seem super small, but they have plenty of fruit, and the fruit is supposed to be small, so maybe that’s normal?

Also, this whole thing where I prune the indeterminants so they make a single vine up the trellis has been working great. They’re only 2 feet apart, but already 4 feet tall, and not crowded together at all. Well except I planted 2 romas, and they’re determinate, so I’m just letting them be crazy bushes. I thought I could kinda tie them to the trellis, but they’re too…. 3D. 🙂 the stupices are semi-determinant, so I’m pruning them to 3 vines. Since they’re next to the romas I can sorta rain them up and over the roma bush things. 🙂 but yeah if I do determinants again I’ll put them somewhere else and go the cage route.

Enough about tomatoes, here’s the rest of the garden:

The peas were fantastic, they almost got to the top of that first trellis. But they’re done now and I’m trying to convince some spaghetti squash to grow there… I’m not doing a very good job of watering though, so I already lost the 2 seedlings that actually germinated. Bah!

Here’s my box o’ potatoes:

I was expecting them to be done by now, but I dunno, I’ve never grown potatoes before. I think they’re supposed to flower or turn yellow or something? Anyway, I’ll give them another 2 weeks then I’ll dig them up, because I want to grow some green beans here!

Here is my “slightly shady” box in the foreground, and my big sunny box further back to the right:

There was an incident with my broccoli… ok not really, it was the only thing still growing in the sunnier box and I wanted to make room for the peppers, so I tried transplanting it and it wasn’t so happy about that. Ah well, the kale seems happy at least… and I already have one little pepper fruit growing, so I’m already doing better than last year with the peppers.

Here are my two new strawberry boxes:

I got some fruit at first, but then temperatures were in the 80s and I think I wasn’t watering them nearly enough. These boxes get late afternoon shade (as you can see) so I’m hoping they won’t fry like my plants last year…

And here’s my experimental strawberry patch:

The decorative fence is to try to convince the dogs to stop running right through it. Sigh. I’m cutting all the runners off the plants in my long skinny boxes, but here I’m just letting the runners do their thing, and we’ll see what happens. The soil here was really compacted, and I just added a few inches on top, so it’ll be an uphill battle for these guys.

One last thing, since my front yard is just a plot of weeds, I decided to try growing some pumpkins. This area near the front gets full sun:

I’ll just have to make sure the vines grow back toward my yard and not into the neighbor’s yard… what could possibly go wrong??? And if nothing germinates, well now I’ve got this random compost-y spot. I’m sure I’ll think of something. My neighbor is really cool, he says he used to grow tomatoes right next to this spot, on his side of the property line of course. 🙂 If I actually manage to grow some pumpkins I’ll totally give him some.